Latest / nondriver / How to Make Your City More Accountable to Nondrivers, ft. Karthik Balasubramanian
Transcript
- speaker-0: We're stuck into this really vicious cycle where we ⁓ have privileged the car so that it's the fastest way to get anywhere. And basically the only people who are taking public transit either live in the exact right places, or more likely, they're forced into this because they're either too young, too old, too poor, or too disabled to drive. and that is over half the district. This time tax metric basically shows a the injustice. And it shows us a way to get out of this vicious cycle towards something more virtuous. speaker-1: Welcome to Non-Driver. speaker-2: Real stories of navigating our world from people who can drive. And I'm Devin Silvernail. speaker-1: I'm on a Z Vart. We have an exciting guest today. I met Karthik, gosh, ⁓ in Washington, DC. And I remember when we first met, I think you and your partner arrived on Bromptons. And so immediately I was intrigued ⁓ as a fellow Brompton ⁓ bike owner. Karthik ⁓ Bala Subramian. Is that hopefully that's you're gonna correct me on that last name pronunciation, but ⁓ grew up in Ohio, ⁓ drove everywhere, and was diagnosed with a genetic. Degenerative eye condition around age 20. He stopped driving at 24 after returning from Tanzania, moved to Seattle, then Boston before settling in DC, where he is a professor at Harvard University. He began advocating in 2018 after experiencing driver hostility on his bike commute, got involved in local advocacy work, and now chairs DC's Multimodal Accessibility Advisory Council. A role he took on specifically to counter the bad faith use of disability arguments against transit and bike infrastructure. Welcome. Thanks for joining us this morning. So, do you want to start just by telling us a little bit about yourself, ⁓ your backstory and ⁓ sort of what that transition from being someone who could drive and and probably didn't anticipate not driving, right? To s to a non driver. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in Ohio in the Cincinnati suburbs. ⁓ and you know, and I was trying to think. I don't even think our subdivision had sidewalks. ⁓ but you know, it was just kind of a foregone conclusion. Basically, the only way that you could get around ⁓ was to have a car. And I was I never questioned that at all. Like, you know, growing up, ⁓ like ⁓ we we had moved actually when I was probably twelve or so. ⁓ but before that we lived in a place that was older and did have ⁓ some sidewalks and there was little cut through to get through our neighborhood to get to the recreation center. And that's actually like, you know, w you know, there's a whole lot of kids in our neighborhood ⁓ that we would all like kind of rove around in like, you know, bike games and it was wonderful. ⁓ but then, you know, in a in the new place, I don't think there were sidewalks and I also like got older and got my, you know, first car at when I was ⁓ when I was 16 and just started driving everywhere. Then I was in college and then I started to see that when I was in class I'd now started to not be able to see the board and and my sisters had ⁓ been diagnosed with Stargardt's macular degeneration earlier. So it was, you know, it was not a surprise ⁓ when I got diagnosed as well. And yeah, then ⁓ basically slowly ⁓ slowly realized hey, I need to ⁓ you know, wean myself off of the car. but it took me it took me a while. I was in North Carolina ⁓ at the time and again, kind of basically not possible to get anywhere. I did have a bike on campus and that was quite useful. ⁓ but really to go anywhere, ⁓ groceries or anywhere off campus, you had to have a car. and yeah, when I was twenty four I just kind of realized, ⁓ man, it is definitely time. ⁓ I'm no longer able to operate this thing safely. I'm and that actually coincided with a move to ⁓ to Tanzania ⁓ where I definitely didn't drive. I did have a bike there and that was quite useful. and ⁓ yeah I then ⁓ from there moved to Seattle and that was cool as just telling Devin that you know ⁓ often I ⁓ Seattle brought me to this brought out the the runner, biker, hiker in me and ⁓ started running to work. and ⁓ also biked a lot to work, but ⁓ still, you know, not really questioning the like the the dogma of of of car ⁓ of ⁓ or just car dependence in general and and all the kind of street design, nothing. Like it was just, ⁓ this is nice, there's a bike link here. Or, ⁓ this is nice. There's like a you know nice sidewalk here. I don't I don't I don't think it it was just I think just subconsciously is like, ⁓ this is a nice place to be. or ⁓ this is an unpleasant place to be. and you know, I think I was pretty, you know, just a casual, you know, a casual, I was certainly not an a advocate at that time. I was there for a couple of years and then I moved to Boston where I was there for six. ⁓ and still kind of same way. ⁓ I was, you know, it was a Boston and Cambridge are pretty like, especially in the places where I was, pretty walkable. I was on campus for grad school and ⁓ pretty walkable and bikeable. So again, wasn't really, you know, kind of the same way as like, ⁓ I really like, you know, the Espinot. I really like these like you know, long ⁓ wrong long bike trails. Those were super nice. ⁓ and I really appreciated them, but I I definitely kind of wasn't ⁓ was not radicalized at all. ⁓ it was only in twenty eighteen when ⁓ we moved to DC. ⁓ my partner Ashton, she ⁓ had done a a master's in city and regional planning at UNC, and she had studied ⁓ land use ⁓ and and also there were ⁓ you know. transportation people there. So like that's where it's kind of started to percolate like, ⁓ there's like some like, you know, our land use is super messed up in the country. And why is you know big chunk of why the land use is super messed up in our country is because ⁓ because we basically paved over a whole lot of great old infrastructure in order to make room for roads and parking lots and and just in general ⁓ general car infrastructure. Coincided with kind of single family zoning, all of this messed up stuff. ⁓ so that was kind of percolating in my head. And then ⁓ when I got here, ⁓ we bought for the first time. When we bought here, it put it basically like, you know, there's some mindset shift where it's like, okay, well, this is we're gonna put roots down. ⁓ and we started going to kind of our local advisory council or advisory neighborhood council meetings. and you know, we were just trying to think about how we could get involved. ⁓ we we learned that there was a bicycle advisory council and a pedestrian advisory council and we started going to those meetings. And that coincided with me. ⁓ you know, ⁓ there's a way for me to take the metro, ⁓ but it is faster for me to to bike to work. And basically as I started biking, I was just like, This is this is garbage. Like, you know, I'm the most direct way. There were shareos on the street, on seventh street in in Washington, DC. There's Sharos. ⁓ But I would get honked at by Maryland drivers. So then I started getting involved, like, you know, in the bicycle advisory council. And then, you know, there's this ⁓ there's a fight over ⁓ protected bike lane in our neighborhood that we started to get involved into. And then that's when I started to hear these bad faith arguments of, ⁓ what about people with disabilities? It's like, ⁓ yeah, what about people with disabilities ⁓ who can't drive? ⁓ and actually the majority of people with disabilities who don't drive. and the yeah, and then you know. realized my leverage point was making that specific argument. and ⁓ basically forcing people to confront ⁓ that, you know, DC is built for drivers who don't live in DC. and we really need to to change that if we really care about DC residents, especially DC residents with disabilities. speaker-2: It's really interesting because there's so many people who ⁓ whether they're non-drivers or they're people who choose to take public transportation or walk or whatever, or even people who drive that get unhappy or angry over the state of things, but then don't necessarily know where to have like find an outlet for that anger. And so I'm curious if you feel like it was just kind of like a happy coincidence that you had started going to these advisory council meetings beforehand, or if ⁓ if it w it was apparent, you know, beyond that that you could have a place to put that energy. speaker-0: G Ash and I have talked about this. We and we also kind of radicalized each other. Like she started getting kind of she started learning and then we started learning together. We shared we shared stuff to each other and you know we essentially we became more and more radicalized. and you know, I don't know where, you know, I think you know, we probably would have, you know, come to it anyway. ⁓ but it was you know, there's a there was a ⁓ there was a big enough community of people who were starting to question the c the status quo or had been questioning the status quo for a long, long time. ⁓ and I think we really benefited from that. Like basically people who had been doing the advocacy for such a long time. And then we started to learn all the terminology and, you know, road classification and ⁓ all the ins and outs of like the you know D dot or district department of transportation's design and engineering manual and, you know, like some of the past fights we started to learn from those. Like You know, was really like on the shoulders of giants. There's a lot of people who kind of fought a long time for ⁓ for this to happen. And I think now finally a lot of things are coming to fruition, but it's still like a it's still a fight street, you know, block by block. speaker-1: I have to say coming to DC, and I know the grass is always greener, right, in other cities and and my experience of DC as someone who comes in for work meetings, you know, a couple of times a year is not the same as someone, you know, in Seattle I live outside of the core and there's no bike infrastructure. And I'm sure that I would probably have the same experience in DC, but like the core of DC feels so bikeable and so transit rich. ⁓ and I think, you know, I'm always intrigued by the people, you know, because we have people of from all over the country coming and and living and working in this really very, very multimodal environment, what kind of impact that has on, say, congressional staffers from other states that don't have that little like petri dish of like, this is what it could be. I and then I think the other really intriguing thing for me too about the DC politics is like, you know, DC is a very small geographic area and political, you know, area in the context of like Maryland and Virginia, right? Like, and so most of the people coming in are not even in the same state or they're not in the same state. ⁓ and that's sort of like how does DC get to control what happens on DC streets? And I've I've heard like, you know, stories about those DC not being able to enforce speeding tickets, right? 'Cause people just leave these fines and fees unpaid because there's no sort of, you know, infrastructure to to support that. It's sort of unique, right, in in the country. Right. As a as a not state. ⁓ but as a place that has all this density. ⁓ What are some of the challenges of doing advocacy in that environment? speaker-0: There are a lot of different federal entities that, you know, have various jurisdictions over, you know, like the architect, the capital has been blocking like a connection to the, you know, one of our core ⁓ bike trails for a long time because they want parking. So they control a set of land. Then the White House, the premier cycle track goes through the White House grounds, but they shut it they sh they close it quite a bit. and ⁓ you know, so so that is like out out of the c out of the control. And then there's a whole system of NPS. NPS owns a ton of parks that they've ⁓ that they've ⁓ neglected for a long time. But then they also because they have jurisdiction, all of that needs to go through NPS. speaker-1: An N P S sorry is National Park Service? speaker-0: Sorry, sorry, National Park Service. Yes. ⁓ and D dot is the district department of transportation stuff can get nationalized too. ⁓ because we don't have ⁓ representatives ⁓ in Congress, ⁓ no senators and only one non voting delegate. and we're subject there was a I think it's 1973 Home Rule Act where basically Congress could disapprove of anything DC does. ⁓ and also controls has kind of essentially veto control over ⁓ DC's budget. ⁓ there are shenanigans that ⁓ that Congress can engage in that really like mess with us ⁓ and could mess with us. ⁓ luckily kind of we haven't really we've only seen that a couple of times in DC's history. ⁓ but that is like a a real obstacle. And in fact right now, Now there's a lot of sensitivity around, ⁓ we can't push too hard because Congressional Republicans ⁓ will will try to screw us even harder. Those are some of the negatives. The the main positive is that because DC is so geographically compact and critically it's both city, it's a city and a state in one. Like D dot, like, you know, once you like in theory, it's the same decision, there's no two levels. So it's the same decision makers that that like you can press over and over and you can start to get to know them too. ⁓ and you s start to see a lot of good people trying to do good work. ⁓ but then you know you know politics both internally to D dot and also like you know externally from ⁓ from council or the mayor start to you know mysteriously you know figure out ways to cancel projects that have you know people have poured blood, sp sweat and tears into. ⁓ but you can advocate like pretty effectively for like individual streets, and you know you could getting into the you're you can get stuff analysis and petitions and ⁓ and advocacy to the right place. They will hear you. And you can testify directly to city council. ⁓ there's a performance oversight hearing and a a budget oversight hearing ⁓ every year. ⁓ and then there are these various councils the pedestrian advisory council, bicycle advisory council and the multimodal accessibility council like where like we can interface directly with D dot, ⁓ DPW is the Department of Public Works, ⁓ you know, Metropolitan Police Department, like all of those folks, like because it's both a city and a state, like you're basically like you're able to you're able to be heard by the decision makers, whether they actually listen to you or not, that's another thing. But like you can get directly to them and that is a very powerful thing. speaker-2: That's very unique too, because I think about, you know, and I we've had this fight ⁓ in in Seattle, right, where you can do something or you can try to do something at the city level and then of course you can't really supersede state law. For example, setting a speed limit. You can't really necessarily go below twenty miles per hour on most roads in y in the state, even if you wanted to. I think I think maybe that might have recently changed, but in my time that was a problem. so that that does kind of give you a little bit of leverage and You know, we also a lot of places have these kind of advisory committees as well. And, you know, speaking from experience, ⁓ I've served on two different advisory committees in two different cities, and it feels like they they were they were kind of touted as this this engagement tool, but also felt really ceremonial unless you pushed ⁓ for the work to happen. I was curious if if it feels that way or if it actually does feel more connected. ⁓ because DC is kind of a little bit ⁓ more connected in that sense. speaker-0: Yeah, it's a it's a it is definitely can and by default is ceremonial. ⁓ a hundred percent. Coming to the Mac is just like you know, it's had been a place where basically people ⁓ came and then you know and they would, you know, give perfunctory feedback and you know, it was more like a checkbox. ⁓ but you know, for us, like there's we've got a couple other folks who are who are really excellent. ⁓ And we basically said, hey, like there are things that make the network of our our road network actively hostile to people with disabilities. and one thing that we chose was daylighting. So ⁓ DC has laws on the books which make it ⁓ illegal ⁓ to stop or stand or park. ⁓ within 25 or 40 feet, depending on exactly how it's configured, ⁓ of an intersection or a mid-block crosswalk. and there are signs all over the place ⁓ that violate that and allow people to violate that. They actually point people, their two hour parking like signs that say, you can park here, or there are road markings that say, you can park here. And that is wildly bad. Because we have these laws in place for a reason, so that people ⁓ don't get injured or killed by people who can't who are who are driving, who can't see them because of parked cars. And we so we kind of cited DC statute. We wrote ⁓ we wrote a you know super well researched letter and we took pictures and we sent ⁓ a sent a letter to D dot and they blew us off essentially. We've ⁓ have been testifying about like this failure at performance oversights hearing year after year. And then this year we created a site called dangerous DC.org where we basically ⁓ where we basically put all of the pictures and a description of the law that was being violated by D dot that D dot's illegal signs and also the 311 tickets that we filed and the status of those tickets and we put it all on. There's like 20 of them on right now. And it's basically saying like this is like an external mechanism for us to say, hey, we've done all of your check boxes. We have we've sent ⁓ D dot letters, we've ⁓ filed through one one requests. Like we're not asking you to do something special. We're asking you to just follow the law. And that is where essentially now like we have this and we've been beating it and beating it, and we will continue to beat it for years until this is done. ⁓ because this is the law. We've would now essentially demanded that we're interacting at the director level. Like, you know, we have D Doc director come, we've got the DPW the Department of Public Works director coming, we've got the department the director of for higher vehicles coming. Oftentimes you'll get ignored until you just basically just keep beating the drum. speaker-1: you worry because these are appointed councils that you're gonna get booted for pushing as hard as you are, do you think that you all have like that's you've built enough political power where that would be unacceptable for them to even consider? speaker-0: I mean it might happen. ⁓ like and if it does, it does. But I'm not saying anything to be mean. I'm saying I'm saying things, ⁓ and we're doing things because they need to get done. Like this is this is like people's ability to live ⁓ like just to lit their lives and move around the district without like getting, you know, killed or injured or or just you know, it takes two and a half times longer to get anywhere on public transit than in a car. And that's terrible in so many direct in in so many dimensions. Like this is totally unacceptable. ⁓ especially in a transit-rich environment like DC. Something called the Transportation Equity Network that I got involved in through DC Families for Safe Streets, which ⁓ is a phenomenal group that basically ⁓ advocates for safer streets. and ⁓ yeah, we were basically trying to distill ⁓ what our vision was for the district. And that vision was basically a place where you are not disadvantaged because you don't drive. So there's this metric. It's not anything new, ⁓ but this metric, I think it's called it ⁓ the the transit ⁓ transit time ratio sometimes it's called the competitiveness ratio, but basically it's going from point A to point B. How long does it take For you to drive there versus how long does it take you to take public transit there? And basically what we did ⁓ was we ⁓ we split up the district into what are called advisory neighborhood commissions, and we basically took the geographic center of all of them to all of the other advisory neighborhood commissions, ⁓ calculate both the drive time and the ⁓ transit time, and then find a ratio. And essentially that ratio was two and a half times on average. And it could have been in some places it was bad as eight. And basically what that means is that ⁓ in the district, even in the transit rich environment in the district, including metro and metro metro rail and metro bus, it takes two and a half times as long for someone who doesn't drive to get from point A to point B than ⁓ someone who does drive. And I wrote a piece with ⁓ Kai Hall, who is the coordinator of the ⁓ transportation equity network. We name this thing the time tax, and because it was basically the tax on the time of people who don't who don't or can't drive. And essentially, you know, if you if you really drill into it, you know, what that's what this is saying is like our all life is is just like a sequence of you know th ⁓ chunks of time. So if we're saying that one person can get there two and a half times faster, what you're saying is the life of a driver is worth two and a half times more than my life. So that's part one. The second part of the metric why we like this is that even for drivers, the fact that it is faster to ⁓ drive than public transit, even for them it's bad. Because if you have to drive, then everyone else driving makes your life worse off. It causes congestion for you. So you want the person who's driving currently in front of you, you don't want them driving. You want them to be opting in for ⁓ for public transit. You want them taking the bus or or metro rail. And so it's actually we we're stuck into this really crappy, negative, vicious cycle where essentially we ⁓ have privileged the car So that it's the fastest way to get anywhere. and basically the only people who are taking public transit are either live in the exact right places or more likely, ⁓ or more likely are captive riders in the sense that there's no other like they're forced into this because they're either too young, too old, too poor, or too disabled to drive. and that is over half the district. This time tax metric basically shows a the injustice and It shows us a way to get out of this vicious cycle towards something more virtuous and speaker-1: For folks, you know, who are who are stuck in the daily grind and, you know, in our cities, ⁓ wherever we are in the world, ⁓ trying to make things a little less car dependent, ⁓ what what, you know, what motivates you and gives you hope? speaker-0: It's the community. Like you're not alone. There are people everywhere who face this issue. and I think and they're and there are people who have like very successfully done stuff. Like, I mean, week without driving was like such a cool idea and now it's like grown. and that is so it was so cool to be a part of that. ⁓ and then also start to see like everyone else who who are you know, who are who's doing this doing this work. So I think it's really kind of like, you know There's enough of a community there of kind of also a little of you know a bit of a YouTube addict. And there's like such good, you know, content of people just, you know, making these arguments and making great content showing like, hey, this is like, you know, this is what a protected bike intersection looks like and this is how it functions and this is, you know, why, you know, this is or or even all the public transit stuff of like, you know, this is like gold standard BRT or ⁓ and you know, now I'm yeah, super Yeah, involved in in advocating for BRT in the district. But I think I think it's just like, you know, feeling like you're you're part of something bigger. And then I think one thing that I realized too is, you know, like it's easy to get discouraged because you know, you look at this and it's like, ⁓ there are like eighteen different ways or eighteen different projects that ⁓ that, you know, were on the books and then they got canceled for some dumb reason, or you know, you're you you're getting blown off. But I think The thing that I realized is that like all this eventually if you stick with it, like nobody's in power forever. Like if you find an issue and focus in and just like basically don't let go, it will always work. Like something like you will find a way to make a difference. It won't be you know, it won't be the, you know, grand vision ⁓ like things are never as bad or as good as you, you know, hope or worry that they will be. But as like if you just like Hone in on something, basically don't let go, you are guaranteed to make a difference. Like this is gonna sound dumb, but like, you know, like we were in the right place at the right time. ⁓ and we advocated for a crosswalk. And there's a crosswalk because we have it, because we were in the right place at the right time. And we said something to the right person at the right time. and daylighting, like finally, after four years, like they're actually they've They've gone through dangerous DC. I think they've like finally got embarrassed enough because we made this site. and they're gonna go through and fix all that. Like they're gonna move all the signs, they're gonna move all the road markings. It might take a year and probably won't like it's definitely not gonna be like in the next couple of months. But I'm pretty confident that they're actually gonna fix all of these things. ⁓ and we're gonna continue to point this out. And now that we have now that we have precedence, ⁓ you know, this establish a precedent. Where they will be responsive to like admitting, hey, this is illegal and we are going to fix it. And that's cool. speaker-1: Crosswalk is a crosswalk, you know? And there's something about a physical thing you're like speaker-2: Yes. Small victories are big victories in any kind of organizing, right? And I mean, I think that like you should embrace that and and you're right. I think that not only does it set precedent there, other advisory c committees that are part of the c the, you know, the DC city government, you know, I think that they can look to you as well and see that they're also not sitting on ceremonial committees that maybe we will have some residents who are ⁓ living in DC as well and looking to get involved. Is there a way that they can come and get involved with the ⁓ multimodal accessibility ⁓ advisory council or any of the other work that you're doing? speaker-0: Doing. We meet ⁓ the second Wednesday of every month at 5 30. MacDC dot link slash meeting is how you join. So yeah, Eddie, like you're totally welcome. Even if you don't live in DC, come come hang out with us. Folks who should absolutely feel welcome to come and please come, especially if you're interested in this stuff. ⁓ but then yeah, there's the pedestrian advisory council, the bicycle advisory council, they also meet monthly. ⁓ there's the Washington Area Bicycling Association. ⁓ there's DC Families for Safe Streets. ⁓ there's GG Wash, ⁓ Greater Greater Washington. ⁓ that's the the the blog with the now both 51c3 and 51c4 organizations. ⁓ yeah, just a l tons of ways to get involved. And also the advisory neighborhood commission. That's a another special thing about DC is ⁓ there's hyperloc, not governance, ⁓ but there are hyper local representatives. So Ashton was a ⁓ was a an advisory neighborhood commission or ⁓ for a year here, ⁓ basically representing two thousand folks, which is like basically our building and a couple other buildings and and ⁓ a couple streets. And that is a way ⁓ for folks to get involved. speaker-1: Awesome. And if people ⁓ you want people to find you or your work ⁓ on the internet is there or get in touch, ⁓ do you want to be found? Do you want to share that? speaker-0: If you Google greater greater or GG wash time tax ⁓ or Karthic time tax, like you'll find it. This is my fervent hope is that people will like start to like calculate this metric for themselves. And just you can do it yourself. Just find go like ⁓ do a trip that you do often, look at the drive time, look at the transit time, and then take the ratio and and then you can find out how much more your ⁓ your city cares about drivers than you. speaker-2: sounds like a really good ⁓ way for folks to ⁓ maybe do some organizing in their own city too. So thanks a lot, Kartsik. It was really cool to have a have this opportunity to talk to you. speaker-1: Thanks for listening to NonDriver. I'm Anna Zievarts. speaker-2: And I'm Devin Silvernail. If today's conversation resonated with you, please subscribe and share the show with a friend. speaker-1: You can also leave us a review wherever you listen. It genuinely helps other people find the show. speaker-2: Non-Driver is brought to you by the NonDrivers Alliance. Find more info at non-drivers.org. speaker-1: And this episode was produced by Devin. speaker-2: Wanna get in touch? Email us at non-driverpodcast at proton.me ⁓ speaker-1: We'll see you next week.